Raymond Blanc (The Restaurant, BBC2) is a lovely bloke and a fantastic chef and doing a pretty good job of whisking some sense into his would-be restaurateurs, but this has been a tough week to be a major player in the chien-mange-chien cooking-on-the-telly genre, because - sorry Jamie and Raymond, bad luck Nigella (more of whom later) - Marco Pierre White is quite simply the newly anointed king.

Hell's Kitchen (ITV1) - the only shiny primetime reality game show with a genuinely scary learning curve, in which slebs cook for other slebs in a faux-restaurant, under the tutelage of a proper, or occasionally improper, chef - used to belong to Gordon Ramsay before being loaned to Jean-Christophe Novelli and Gary Rhodes. Now, however, it feels as though it has finally come home, even while - ironically - the format itself may be flagging.

Marco, owner of three Michelin stars back when Ramsay was still peeling spuds, hasn't cooked in a kitchen other than, presumably, his own for the whole of the 21st century. I can't think what tempted him out of his hunting-shooting-fishing-and-spending-more-time-with-the-kids (when they're not at boarding school) semi-retirement, but I doubt it would be the money, given he has a stake in roughly half the restaurants in London. And of course he's always been pretty disparaging about telly-chefing.

Perhaps, in ex-prime ministerial fashion, he has an eye on his legacy, even if teaching the usual mix of ex-pop stars, sportspersons, reality-show graduates, wags and Emmerladies (not to mention Jim Davidson, Rosie Boycott and Anneka Rice) how to cook is a fairly perverse way to remind us that he's the man who taught Ramsay everything he knows.

I would prefer to see Marco presiding over a proper cooking programme, the sort without a single close-up of the thread-count on his kids' Egyptian cotton duvet covers or the inside of his wife's shoe cupboard - but I'll take my Pierre White wherever I can get it, frankly, even if in Hell's Kitchen the food necessarily takes second place to the camera-hunger-pangs of Brian-from-Big-Brother (the gay one, by the way, not the black one) or Abigail (My-boyfriend-is-Peter-Crouch) Clancy's spectacular teeth.

Nonetheless, for those of us who care a bit about food and are prepared to fight the format, there are occasional heartening reminders that, sandwiched between the contestants falling desperately in love with Marco, there is some cooking going on. Ooh, you can smell the pheromones...

'We are now Marco's maidens,' blushed the never-knowingly coy Rosie Boycott on Wednesday. 'He keeps saying he's going to take me by the hand and lead me somewhere. I only wish he would,' Anneka gushed. ('Anneka and Marco: a marriage made in hell. What would her surname be? White-Rice?' deadpanned host Angus Deayton). Even the boys are smitten. Hardly surprising, given the fact that MPW is easily the most testosterone-fuelled alpha male presence on TV.

I once smelt the pheromones close-up, years ago, when he was cooking at the Hyde Park Hotel (an oddly uncharismatic and stand-offish room) and I was having lunch there with his then-PR. That fact alone probably guaranteed a certain amount of attention from le patron but the performance that followed was Bafta-worthy. Bursting from the kitchen (to the delight of the other diners), MPW launched himself at our table, sat down, removed the menu from my hands and insisted on cooking something off-piste. He asked me what I liked, I wittered a bit in a quite hopelessly girly fashion before the words sea bass cropped-up somewhere, which was enough for Marco: 'Sea-bass is a very important fish!' he replied, sotto voce, before whirling back behind the swing-doors.

The afternoon, lubricated by wine, ended in the early evening when Marco presented me with a dripping bouquet of lilies he'd liberated from a vase in reception and ran out into the middle of the Knightsbridge traffic to flag down a taxi. The food - a tower of sea bass, a dessert of equal parts silliness and deliciousness - was, I might add, awesome. It was all monumentally entertaining but fearing both the law of diminishing returns and the potential fiscal downsides of developing an MPW-habit, an experience I never felt the need to repeat.

I tell you this only to illustrate that while he may be almost as fine a performer as he is a chef, MPW's overwhelming passion for the food means he can never be a wholly convincing actor. When on Monday he told his slebs, quietly: 'I haven't been in a kitchen for seven and a half years', it sounded like more of a confession (I hardly dare breathe the words mid-life crisis) or even a plea than it needed to - though not quite up there with Davidson's positively desperate: 'I'm just tired and old and scared, I think. I always think I can do things and I can't. Everything I've done in my life has been crap, really, apart from comedy...' (and, arguably, Jim... OK, no, even I haven't the heart to kick a man in the throes of a two-week on-screen confessional.)

So, anyway, I still can't quite work out why Marco Pierre White is doing Hell's Kitchen but I'm very glad he is. Baffling, though, that this series has not been quite the ratings-banker for ITV1 it once was. Perhaps viewers prefer their maverick superchefs to go a little easier on the mercury.

Nigella Express (BBC2) is, well, more of the same really. What's left to be said? And if that sounds dismissive, then it is, just a bit. I am a fan of Nigella's earthy approach to cooking and everything she served here looked deliciously simple and desirably more-ish, but the faux-lifestyle stuff - which seems to eat up more and more of each series - is increasingly unwatchable. The twee scenelets set in taxis and drinks parties ('I hardly ever go out, but when I do...'), the shots of beeping Blackberrys and jangling keys, earrings being removed and slingbacks being slung, the arch set-pieces with the kids (tucking her son up in bed? He's 11...) and daddy and friends are all enormously off-putting for those who prefer to tune into an alleged cookery programme for, um - so shoot me - the food. But maybe it's just a gender thing: if I've got Marco glowering at diners fool enough to complain, albeit only for a fortnight, then maybe Nigella - slingbacks, finger-sucking, hair-tossing, naughty puddings and all - is a fair trade for the boys. I just feel a bit cheated.

What with Nigella taking self-parody to new and, presumably, knowing heights it feels that the moment for any chef-based sketch comedy may have passed, possibly in about 2004. Not that that stopped Jennifer Saunders - blood-spattered chefs' whites, small dead animals tied around her waist - serving Dawn French 'a pea in spit' in an overdone, unfunny spoof during A Bucket o' French and Saunders, BBC1's 20 Years Of... mixture of old hits and new material.

I fear that, like old rock stars reforming for occasional gigs, all we'll ever want from F&S now are the hits. The good news is that we get them in this series, which only serves to highlight the bad news: they're just not as funny as they used to be. It's quite a cruel technique, really, juxtaposing their peerless music and film spoofs, of Abba (was that Chris Langham as a Bjenny?) and Madonna, their collection of hormonal teenagers and the two scrofulous crotch-scratching fat blokes (I'd forgotten quite how much of a comedy debt is owed to F&S by Catherine Tate, Matt Lucas and David Walliams and the Tittybangbang girls) with a slightly self-indulgent we're-still-here-and-maybe-that's-enough approach to new material. Despite sensibly never appearing in the same scenes, the pair were wildly upstaged by show host Joanna Lumley, with a character pitched somewhere just south of Ab Fab's Patsy and to the east of Sensitive Skin's Davina, proving that some comedians are fortunate enough to mature more like Bolly than camembert.

I don't usually watch Tribe (BBC2) for its culinary tips, but for a lifestyle even MPW or Nigella might envy it was hard to beat Bruce Parry's three week stay on tiny, gorgeous Anuta, in the Solomon Islands, home to 250 of the most charming people on the planet.

Feel-good telly doesn't come any more sweetly heart-warming, nor escapist fantasies any more seductive. The islanders - many of whom have been educated far from home before returning, all of whom are Christians - welcomed Parry with handshakes and later, after much cheerful fishing and bird-hunting, eating and singing, canoe-building and general fun and all-round loveliness, sent him off with mass ululation and nose-kisses.

Parry looked heartbroken to be leaving, which was understandable, but at least he'd got to go. Some of us were just heartbroken we'd never get there at all.